Culture Tally

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ranks No. 8 in attendance among U.S. art museums

  • "Madame Ramón Subercaseaux," John Singer Sargent, c. 1880-81, oil on canvas,Fayez Sarofim Collection
  • The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Max Liebermann, "Garden Restaurant on the Havel, Nikolskoe," 1916
    Photo by Klaus Gˆken
  • "Five Holy Men" (detail), c. 1670, signed by Riza ´Abbasi
  • "Meat's Not Meat Till It's in the Pan" (1915) by Charles M. Russell
  • "Tour Bus" by Sungsoo Koo, 2005, chromogenic photograph
  • From the MFAH exhibition, "The Moon"
    The MFAH, the Target Collection of American Photography, gift of Target Stores
  • Alice Neel, "Robert Smithson" (detail)
  • Ishimoto Yasuhiro,"Untitled" from the series "Katsura," 1953-54

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is making its way through the ranks in recently released statistics by The Art Newspaper. Among U.S. museums, the MFAH ranks at No. 8 in attendance for 2010.

The 1.125 million attendance figure places the museum between Washington D.C.'s National Portrait Gallery and New York's heralded Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was No.1 in the U.S. rankings.

The MFAH ranking represents a slight slip from the 2009 list, where MFAH claimed the No. 7 spot. Among museum visitations worldwide, the MFAH ranked 38 in 2010, down from No. 30 in 2009. (The Louvre is No. 1 in 2010 worldwide rankings, followed by the British Museum and the Met in New York.)

Even so, Houston's presence on the global list speaks to the city's vitality as it welcomes the American Association of Museums conference in May. Notably, the Dallas Museum of Art, which ranked highly in 2009, neglected to submit the newspaper's survey in time to be considered.

The Sargent and the Sea exhibition drew the most visitors of any MFAH exhibit in 2010, reeling in a total 216,813 visitors. Several other ranked exhibitions were profiled in CultureMap in 2010, including German Impressionist Landscape Painting(147,942 visitors), The Moon (143,840), Light of the Sufis: the Mystical Arts of Islam (137,167), The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell(128,615), Alice Neel: Painted Truths(108,658),and Katsura: Picturing Modernism (103,905).

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